Starting this December, Toyota’s commercial truck brand, Hino, will offer a pair of Class 4 and Class 5 cab-over-engine trucks powered by diesel-electric hybrid powertrains in the U.S. These mark the first such commercial applications in the States, and with aero-tuned cabs atop their beefy chassis, the Hino hybrids will provide the foundations for a variety of purposes such as urban delivery vans, dump trucks, stake beds, and bucket-lift trucks. It’s unlikely very many will wind up as chrome-drenched and leather-lined glamour rigs, so the Cadillac Escalade hybrid will still reign supreme as the choice for those who need to haul passengers and not goods. With GVW ratings of 14,500 pounds for the light-duty 155h and 19,500 pounds for the sumo-grade (medium-duty) 195h, the hybrid trucks combine Hino’s 5.0-liter turbo-diesel four-cylinder engine—it makes 210 hp and 440 lb-ft of torque—with a single electric motor contributing another 48 hp and 250 lb-ft. The motor is sandwiched between the flywheel and the six-speed automatic transmission’s torque converter. The electric motor gets its juice from a 288-volt nickel-metal-hydride battery pack shared in large part with the Lexus LS600hL (which weighs 5220 pounds, or just half a ton or so less than the standard Hino 155h). Compared to their diesel-only counterparts, which arrive in August, the 155h and 195h weigh roughly 400 pounds more.
Like a Toyota Prius and most other hybrids, the Hino trucks will feature engine shutoff at idle and brake-regeneration systems, although no pure-EV driving mode—the latter is no surprise, given their weight. Nor can the electric motor serve as a generator to provide power for whatever component might be fitted to the chassis. There is, however, an “Eco” light within the hybrid-related info display that illuminates when the driver accelerates prudently and steps gingerly upon the brake pedal. Which means more slow-traveling box trucks. So hooray for that.
The electric power will not catapult the fuel-economy ratings of either Hino hybrid into the Priusphere. However, according to a Hino spokesman in the U.S., Toyota already has 12,000 or so of these systems on the road in Japan, and has found that fuel economy jumps by roughly 30 percent compared to the 12 mpg or so of its diesel-only counterparts.

While this is the first time hybrid technology like this has been applied to the commercial market here in the U.S., this is not the first time we’ve seen super-sized hybrids—both Toyota and General Motors have been building hybrid city buses for years.